Digital photography provides several advantages over film for photographers. Two such advantages are the ability to capture a multitude of digital images with little or no added expense and the ability to share the digital images with other individuals who may have a particular interest in the subject matter of the digital images. Digital images are often shared, using conventional methods, via electronic means such as email or online photo-sharing sites. Such conventional methods provide limited capabilities for groups of individuals who wish to share photos. Typically, using conventional methods, an individual shares digital images by sending emails to other individuals and/or by uploading the digital images to a personal photo-sharing site. Individuals are likely to wait until after a particular event is completed to share photos of the event because conventional methods do not provide a convenient mechanism for sharing a large number of photos, in real-time, while attending an event.
Individuals attending the same event or visiting a same location may share an interest in images taken at the event or location. Accordingly, the individuals may wish to share, in real-time, while attending the event or location, images captured at the event or location. Conventional methods do not provide a convenient mechanism for groups of individuals at a same event or location to share digital images, as a group, in real-time, as the images are being captured. The individuals at an event or location may want to search for images, captured by other individuals at the event or location, which contain particular content from the event or location. The individuals at the event or location may also want to receive particular images captured at the event or location based on statistics for the images, such as statistics which indicate the most popular, or most highly ranked, images. Conventional methods do not provide a mechanism for creating a real-time image collection which enables individuals to retrieve images from the collection based on statistics or real-time image searches.